UH Calendar

2024 AAEF Fares Lecture: “Dreams of Arab Modernity”

Thursday, January 25, 2024

5:30 pm - 7:30 pm

Please join the Arab-American Educational Foundation Center for Arab Studies on Thursday, January 25, for the 2024 AAEF Nijad and Zeina Fares Annual Distinguished Lecture in Arab Studies: “Dreams of Arab Modernity” featuring Amale Andraos Professor and Dean Emeritus (Columbia University).

While western modernism continues to occupy architects’ unconscious today, it is often in its megalomaniac form, with an unsaid nostalgia for the power that it seemed to embody. Yet for many of us born in the Arab world, modernity and its architectural manifestations are ‘less power and more flower’: vulnerable fleeting dreams whose premature deaths leave us with what could have been, what was lost, and maybe, what could still be. Through a series of architectural and urban projects for Beirut and across Arab cities, the lecture will explore this particular modernist unconscious, with a resiliently hopeful disposition for the future.

Amale Andraos, HFRAIC, is a principal of WORKac which she co-founded with her partner Dan Wood in 2003. Andraos is also Professor and Dean Emeritus at Columbia University where she recently served as an Advisor to the President on the University’s Climate Initiatives and the Climate School. Andraos is recognized as an architecture thought leader and has lectured and taught widely. Her publications include The Arab City: Architecture and Representation, We’ll Get There When We Cross That Bridge, 49 Cities and ‘Above the Pavement the Farm.’

An award-winning architecture and design practice, WORKac is committed to creating architecture that engages environmental and social concerns with a particular emphasis on public, cultural and civic projects. The practice has achieved international acclaim for projects such as the Edible Schoolyards in Brooklyn and Harlem, the Blaffer Museum of Art in Houston, the Miami Museum Garage, the new Student Success Center at the Rhode Island School of Design and two new community centers in Mexico City. Current projects include the North Boulder Public Library, the Sibley Dome Renovation at Cornell, a strategic plan and series of projects for Vassar College as well as the Beirut Museum of Art.